Some places have a natural sense romance about them. It’s not always the sort of romance that involves people longingly embracing on precipices, at least not literal ones, but the dingy, more exotic kind that people longingly write novels and waltzes about. Toronto’s A Dark Horse pub was treated to the latter by Jenni & The Hummingbird along with a lyric video.
Paired With a dark lyric video crafted by Aidan Searle, the song paints a picture of a small town pub unhappily displaced inside of a big city. Apparently A Dark Horse has seen better days and so have its patrons.
Jenni Roberge, the band’s namesake, began crafting a song about the pub back in 2013 while she was living in Toronto.
“A Dark Horse is the name of a pub located at Bloor and Armadale (West end of Toronto in the Bloor West Village),” explains Roberge.
“People would always talk about this old worn-down pub, wondering how it’s still running. There were dead flowers hanging from the ceiling, old chandeliers, and then the regulars who would be there every day.
The regulars were our friends, but it soon became a dark, sad place as you grew to know each of them on a personal level. A lot of them were depressed, ill, away from their family, and a few even passed away while working there.
You began to grow quite guilty fuelling drinking addictions while working there. It really made me think of a lot of other places similar to A Dark Horse.”
It wasn’t until 2016 that Roberge got around to setting in stone. Enlisting Toronto’s Beth Silver on cello, Charlottetown’s Kinley Dowling on Violin/Viola, and Chris Martell on the double bass, the string section gives a rich atmospheric presence to the song. “A Dark Horse” calls to mind some of the odes that The Beatles crafted to their familiar haunts, like “Penny Lane” or “Strawberry Fields,” but far more brooding.